Share this listing

Genre

Distributor

Release Date

Release Notes

Official Website

Review

There are recognizable human forms in the first section of Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff,
but nothing in the way of individuals. It’s 1845 (as a quaintly
embroidered title card reveals), and a wagon train is making its slow
way west on the Oregon Trail. You hear not voices but the snorting of
horses, the squeaking of wheels, the clanking of pans … birds … insects …
the wind in the dry grass. Over the next half-hour, the characters
emerge, and because their faces have been withheld for so long you might
start to get excited when you figure out who’s who. You might even
think, “These people are so real.” It’s an impressive piece of arthouse
flimflam.

No, the con isn’t conscious—I don’t think Reichardt believes she’s anything but a visionary. Meek’s Cutoff
is being widely celebrated as a unique female perspective on American
white-male expansionism, and it certainly aims to be. Michelle Williams,
star of Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, crosses her arms and stares
out from under her bonnet in obvious disapproval at the bushy blowhard
Buffalo Bill wannabe Meek, who I thought was Dennis Quaid but turned out
to be Bruce Greenwood. He gets them allegorically lost, whereupon they
encounter a lone Cayuse Native American (Ron Rondeaux), whom they
allegorically capture and beat and tie up while Williams watches
silently. You know she’s going to be the one to bring him food and water
and then intervene to try to keep him from harm—but this is the kind of
movie in which there are long, arty stretches between clichés.

For all its indirection, Meek’s Cutoff is an utterly
conventional film. But it’s worth asking whether Reichardt’s drowsy
rhythms, stripped-down scenario, and female vantage (which extends to
her choice of a square, constricted frame instead of one more
Pana-visual) add up to something illuminating. And here’s where she
earns at least some of those plaudits she’s been getting. With the help
of Leslie Shatz’s sound design and Chris Blauvelt’s inspired use of
available light (or lack thereof), the settlers’ alienation from the
natural landscape stays with you long after the movie ends. American
mythologists like to talk about the sturdy “pioneer spirit,” but
Reichardt’s westward-ho is a world of confusion, geographical and moral,
a dislocation beyond the remedy of water or Bibles.
— David Edelstein